Such is the unpredictable nature of Kanye West, it would be potentially humiliating to pen a speculative post predicting what his seventh album, Waves, might sound like. It’s incredibly likely that a large portion of the below will alter before its release date on 11 February: for all we know, the wind may change and the musical innovator may scrap the past three years’ worth of work and instead release a mini disc of bird-sounds remixed by Irish manband the Script.

For the meantime, however, he has left a series of clues and comments that we’ve digested and pieced together below. I’ve no idea of the identity of the “Joey Glo” who appears on his tracklist, though. A cursory Googling returns among its results the Wikipedia page for fictional Italian and Friends heartthrob Joey Tribbiani. Stranger things have happened.

Current album title

Waves, formerly Swish, formerly So Help Me God. Apparently the last-minute change of name is something to do with Hudson Mohawke:

Current tracklist

Kanye West: 10 of the best

Read more

West is no stranger to the concept of a chaptered narrative: his first wave of albums – The College Dropout (2004), Late Registration (2005) and Graduation (2007) – were a trilogy, and according to a recent studio doodle, Waves will be defined by three acts:

Potential artwork

In his own words

“[On the new album I am] just embracing the music, embracing joy, and just being of service to the people.” – February 2015

“A sonic landscape, a two-year painting. [Fade] has been a year and a half in the making and it may be still a year from being complete. But it was to let people get a glimpse at the painting.” – September 2015

“It’s like a sonic painting, and it gets better and better every week.” - November 2015

“This is not album of the year. This is album of the life.” – January 2016

It’s also likely to feature Drake. Some fans have dredged up the below image of Drake and Kanye from 11 weeks ago, adorned with the wave emoji as a caption. Kanye has also reportedly sampled Larry Graham, Drake’s uncle.

“He wrote the letters out and then went back over much of the title to add more colour and thickness to the writing. All of this suggests a bit of an obsessive streak. The tendency to ‘overdo’ the letters suggests that when it comes to his art, Kayne has no qualms about going over the top, pressing every id button he can.” – Vocativ.com

“He’s clearly got a lot of intuition and flexibility, and the writing suggests restlessness ­– he needs to be with people and creating all the time. He definitely lives in the here-and-now.” – Dazed and Confused

“He writes in capital letters throughout, which means that he’s interested in the here and now. It also means he’s wearing a mask – he doesn’t want people to see what goes on privately. He loves a mystery – so he wants to be inscrutable. He doesn’t want to reveal the real man beneath the layers. Instead, he projects a ‘persona’ that fits the bill for whatever he’s doing at that moment in time.” - NME.com

According to the Guardian’s contact – Philip Hensher, professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University – it’s very common to see handwriting by under-35s in America with no joins at all, just painted letters. While it is pretty common to see a handwriting that is all upper case, like this, Hensher does add that “the deliberate use of capitals can in some cases be a means of concealing personality”.